untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play review — dynamite show blowing up Asian stereotypes

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Crackling with asterisks, untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play is a suitably sparky title for a show that’s like a lit stick of dynamite. Kimber Lee’s breathlessly anarchic, white-knuckle potted history of representation of Asian people in pop culture was written as blowback against the shows that embody it.

It wastes no time in lampooning a series of them, first clipping Madama Butterfly’s wings. The tragic ingénue here is Kim (played by Mei Mac), stepping out on to the muddy scrubland of Khadija Raza’s rust-coloured stage, an oil slick of dirt and decay.

In fact, she’s Kim in every story. Her spinning hut becomes a merry-go-round of similar problematic narratives, barrelling through South Pacific and M*A*S*H. Throughout all its revolutions, the character stays singular, the archetype unbending, just like the tropes: the “virginal” peasant in the “cesspool” village; the promise of America from the genuflecting white knight; the hopeless suicide. Raza’s design also reuses the same elements and trappings — bamboo posts, low furniture, oil lamps — to echo the constant rehashing in these stories.

The idea of escaping to America runs parallel to Kim trying to escape the doom loop of the play. As she ricochets through this multiverse, Mei Mac gathers velocity like a meteor. At first she is fluttering and swooning; meek deference and courteous smiles bloom on her face. Then she uncoils out of the tightly bound movements, swaggering instead of scurrying, locking eyes rather than lowering them.

She’s buffeted by reductive conventions at every turn. Tom Weston-Jones’s white-saviour GI speaks in excruciating stereotypes and shorthands: “katsu” for “greetings”, “shogun origami” for “it’s been a long time”. When she pleads with him to take their child to America, “Haribo” is his reply. His patronising tone makes his moony exoticising — “You taste like moonlight and jasmine and mystery” — even more grotesque. Likewise, Rochelle Rose’s arch narrator has the avuncular cadence of a nature documentary voiceover, observing an exotic species. And there Kim sits, inside the hut, limbs tucked, like an ornament in a cabinet.

Chirpy song-breakouts reflect how the musicals sanitise these grisly overtones. But it takes time for the rug-pull. Lee toys with her audience like a cat with a mouse; it ridicules for too long before it strikes. Her fury and protest create a scrappiness: she doesn’t always seem to know what to do with her targets, other than point them out and let them flounder in the spotlight. Her keenness to expose also results in spoon-feeding: every device, detail and effect is dissected and stated aloud.

She finds more mischief in the form-defying final act, though it’s an off-kilter shift into broad rather than concentrated critical blows. Sometimes Lee singes rather than scorches, but on the whole, Miss Saigon doesn’t stand a chance.

★★★★☆

To July 22, royalexchange.co.uk